Mega Champ

Time and again you will come across some asking about dofollow or nofollow links terminologies. When I came into this website making business, I was on the same boat, wondering what these things meant and how they help a website. So I thought of preparing a q&a to help now that I know some things about links. As this is all personal experience, do correct me if I go wrong somewhere.

What are Backlinks

Backlinks basically tells you about how many websites are linking to your website from theirs. Like if you have website A and someone from website B puts a link on his/her website/blog pointing to your website it is counted as a backlink.

How Do Backlinks Help A Website Or A Blog

This topic is little subjective and different people have different opinions about it. On the whole, if your website has more backlinks, more will be the chances of it fairing better in search engine rankings. But there is one very important thing to note here, the backlinks coming to your website should be mostly from similar niche website, only then they give out their full potential and help your website. So, if you have a mobile related website and you have a link coming from a sports website, it doesn’t add much value to your backlink power(or SEO score) but if you have a link coming from a tech/mobile website, it automatically increases your website credibility.

How Does Google Page Rank(PR) Relates To Backlinks

Google as we know gives out page ranks to websites based on their algorithm, it ranges from 0-10. More the PR rank, better the chances for your website appearing on top pages in search engines(basically Google Search Engine). So, when you have a backlink coming from a PR 5 website, it automatically increases your website search engine credibility or SEO score. And please note that it will also help a lot in increasing your website PR as well.

Site Wide And Home Page Backlink

Site Wide backlink means when you have backlinks coming from a single website, but your link is placed in all the pages of that website. Lets say, your website link is placed in the footer of a website and footer as we know will appear in all the pages for that website. So, you will have multiple backlink coming from that website to you.

Home Page backlink means when you have a backlink coming from a single page of a website, preferably home page.

Which Is Better Site Wide Or Home Page Backlink

This topic is also subjective and everyone has their own opinions about it. Site wide backlink will increase your backlink count, but I dont think it will help much in increasing your PR value, unless all the pages of that website(from where the backlink is coming from) are having PR if their own.

Hence getting a home page backlink is always better. But it always depends on personal choice.

What Are DoFollow And NoFollow Link

When a website places a link on their website, they give out a relational(rel) tag in the html code of that link.
So, when that rel tag stores a value of “Nofollow”, it means that this link will not count as backlink, and doesn’t serve any purpose or add any value to your website in terms of Search Engine Scores.

“Nofollow” basically tells search engine to not to follow the website in the link. For e.g <a href=http://google.com rel=”nofollow”>Google</a></code>

“Dofollow” is actually not a value for the rel tag. It basically means that if you are not including “Nofollow” , its a dofollow backlink. So to get a link counted as backlink, it should be a dofollow, which inturn means that it should not be having a tag “rel = “nofollow” where you backlink is placed.

How To Find Out A Link Is DoFollow Or NoFollow

Its very simple to identify whether a particular link is dofollow or nofollow. Just go to the website where your link is placed, view the html source of that page and check for tag called ” rel=”nofollow” against your link. If its not there, then it means all is good and you have valid backlink to your website.

So basically it will look out like this :

<a href =”http://yourwebsite.com”>Your Website</a>

But if its there, the it will look like this :

<a href =”http://yourwebsite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Your Website</a>

That is all, I hope it helps is some way for people wondering about backlinks. If any queries, suggestions, please let me know through comments.

This is from my personal experience

I am pretty sure if you are into building backlinks for your website/blog, you must have got advice from loads of people that being in a top commentators list is the easiest way to get high quality backlinks. But most of the people forget to read the thin line which says that, the most of the high ranking blogs reset the top commentator plugin once a month, or sometimes once a week.

So, if you work hard for month to gain some links but loose all the links at once and at the same time google updates the PR, you are into pretty hard luck. It happened to me, I built great amount of backlinks through top commentators plugin and was pretty sure that in the next Google PR update my ranking will shoot up like anything. But then the month end came, all the links were reset and i lost around 50 of high PR link, which made my whole link building a disastrous experience.

Just wanted to warn in advance you, be little cautious while dealing with top commentators link. First verify how often the blog owner resets the links and then act accordingly .